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PASCAGOULA, Miss.—A $13.3 billion program to safeguard American interests in the Arctic has run aground on an old industrial challenge: cutting and shaping thick, hardened steel. U.S. officials are racing to procure new polar icebreakers because one of only two that the Coast Guard now sails has reached the end of its life, and the one assigned to the Arctic is out of service for maintenance every winter. Delivery of the first new icebreaker has slipped to 2028 from 2024 as designers, engineers and welders grapple with something the U.S. hasn’t done in decades: reliably shape hardened steel that is...

Latest Arctic challenges illustrate the difficulties in predicting climate change effects. Russia’s newest icebreaker—an 82-metre, 4,000-ton naval vessel—has joined its Pacific fleet off the Kamchatka peninsula, just across the Bering Sea from Alaska. But the route the Yevpatii Kolovrat navigated in mid-May has raised some eyebrows. Instead of traversing Arctic waters from the St. Petersburg shipyard where it was built, the ship sailed out into the Atlantic and south to the Mediterranean Sea. It then passed through the Suez Canal and crossed the Indian Ocean into the Philippine Sea before it arrived at its home port in Petropavlovsk in the...

President Donald Trump says his Administration is working to secure 10 icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard. He also claimed that these ships would be cheaper to acquire than that service's future Polar Security Cutters, a new class of heavy icebreakers, the first of which is now under construction. This comes just over a month after Trump ordered the Coast Guard to review its existing icebreaker plans and to look into the possibility of buying or leasing additional ice-capable ships, including nuclear-powered types.

The only way to fix the faulty engine is to lift it out of the hull and replace it with a new one, a work that will cause another year of delay for Russia’s new prestigious nuclear-powered icebreaker. It was during sea trials in the Baltic Sea in February a short circuit caused serious damage to the winding in one of the three electro engines onboard the “Arktika” icebreaker. Sea trials continued with only two of the engines working. Newspaper Kommersant can now tell, with reference to the investigative commission’s work, that it is considered impossible to repair the broken...

Russia’s state nuclear agency has launched a new icebreaker, Ural, as part of the country’s plans to dominate the newly warming Arctic region. The nuclear-powered ship is one of three new icebreakers commissioned by Moscow to navigate waters choked with sea ice and smash its way through if necessary. The ship, Ural, is the third in the class of three Project 22220 icebreakers. The ship was constructed by the Baltic Shipyards of St. Petersburg and will be handed over to Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, in 2021. The Project 22220 ships are 173 meters (567 feet) long and 34 meters (111...

The ice in the Arctic is melting and opening new navigation routes, with Russia responding with a fleet of 44 icebreakers and China developing its own fleet although they are nowhere near polar regions. The United States had just one operational polar-class icebreaker. The 42-year old Polar Star was assigned permanently to Antarctic waters. "We have to get in the game," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in Seattle on Thursday. "We are an Arctic nation without Arctic resources," added Murkowski who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Fire erupted in technical compartments of icebreaker VIKTOR CHERNOMYRDIN under construction at Admiralty Shipyard, S-Petersburg, Russia, at around 1900 Moscow time Nov 27. Some 300 sq meters of compartments in superstructure were engulfed in fire, 35 engines and 140 firefighters were deployed. Fire was taken under control in two and a half hours, later Emergency Service Command said fire was extinguished. 2 people were injured, one of them hospitalized. No information yet on extent and character of damages. Diesel-powered icebreaker VIKTOR CHERNOMYRDIN (Project 22600 or LK-25), IMO 9658630, displacement 22000 tons, keel laid in 2012 at Baltiysky Zavod S-Petersburg, initially...

As Russia is building literally a new armada of new icebreakers, ice-capable supply ships, a massive arctic "research" submarine and icebreaker surface combatants armed with cruise missiles, the Pentagon is now looking at arming its relatively tiny fleet of future icebreakers with similar weapons as well. The revelation came during a House subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing where Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft was discussing the service's plans to build three new medium icebreakers, with the first delivery occurring by 2023. A major design study is underway now and the nature of the icebreaker's capabilities still remain up for...

Much has been made about America's so-called "icebreaker gap"—Russia has roughly 40 with many more in production while the US has one that is operational—and we have talked extensively about how the frigid arctic is likely to be a contested territory and battlefield of the future. But Russia isn't just building more icebreakers or ice-capable logistics ships—they are also building fighting ships that can go independently where few other surface combatant can, and carry much heavier firepower while doing so. Russia has ordered two of the 6,800 ton displacement, 374 foot-long Project 23550 Ice class patrol ships, which are more...

Built by Arctech Helsinki for the Russian Ministry of Transport, the Icebreaking Multipurpose Emergency and Rescue Vessel Baltika is a first-of-its-kind icebreaker built with an asymmetrical hull allowing for not only ahead and astern icebreaking, but also “oblique” icebreaking for a greater angle of attack.

United States Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Homeland Security calling for robust funding in the fiscal year 2016 appropriations legislation for the U.S. Coast Guard to design and build a new heavy icebreaker for the Great Lakes regio

"President Obama will ask Congress Tuesday to speed up the construction of new icebreaker ships in order to protect U.S. interests and resources in the Arctic, amid growing concern that the U.S. has ceded influence to Russia in the strategic waters."

Yesterday I posted this quote from Elizabeth from the Will Steger Foundation global warming expedition to the artic.............. It felt so good to be back on trail. The weather was relatively warm for this time of year, there was little wind and the sun was shining. The mountains plunge dramatically to the ice on all sides. The U-shape of the head of the fiord ahead of us gave us a clue to the glaciations that sculpted this land, grinding away the granite to leave sheer walls of bare rock. I felt like I was inside an I-Max movie. I couldn't...

CANBERRA, Australia — An Australian icebreaker carrying 52 passengers who were retrieved from an icebound ship in the Antarctic was told to halt its journey home on Friday after a Chinese vessel involved in the dramatic rescue became concerned that it, too, may get stuck in the heavy sea ice. **SNIP** But on Friday afternoon, the crew of a Chinese icebreaker that had provided the helicopter said they were worried about their own ship's ability to move through the ice. The Aurora — which was carrying the passengers to the Australian island state of Tasmania — was told to stay...

ABOARD XUELONG, Jan. 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese helicopter Xueying (Snow Eagle) on board the icebreaker Xuelong has been prepared for the airlift of trapped passengers on a Russian vessel stuck in sea ice off Antarctica, Xueying captain Jia Shuliang told Xinhua on Wednesday. "The crew members have been readied to transport the 52 scientists and tourists aboard MV Akademik Shokalskiy with their luggage to Xuelong in groups of 12," Jia said. According to the rescue plan, six crew members will be split into three two-person teams, respectively responsible for flying the helicopter and guaranteeing the ground service on board Xuelong...

The helicopter rescue crew is coming to take me away, ha-haaa! They're coming to take me away, ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-haaa! To the funny farm. Where I can find banana peanut butter milkshakes sprinkled with delicious carbon credits. We thought it was a joke and so we laughed, we laughed when I had said that proving global warming had trapped us in ice and that I'm going MAD!!! And U.K. Guardian reporter Laurence Topham has proclaimed himself going mad (along with his craving for banana peanut butter milkshakes) in this rather morose video diary in which he discovers that that the...

The first set of John Gardner 007 continuation novel trade paperbacks out on Tuesday in the US and the UK. The first three novels shall be License Renewed, Icebreaker, For Special Services and Two more shall be released in May. US Covers UK Covers

ST. PETERSBURG, April 21 (RIA Novosti) - Russia is planning to complete the construction of a third-generation nuclear-powered icebreaker by 2015, the head of the state nuclear corporation Rosatom said on Tuesday. Responsibility for Russia's nuclear icebreaker fleet was handed over to Rosatom from the Murmansk Shipping Company on August 27, 2008. "A federal program has allocated 17 billion rubles [$500 mln] for the development of a new-generation icebreaker," Sergei Kiriyenko said. Kiriyenko said the Iceberg Design Bureau in St. Petersburg would prepare the design of the icebreaker by 2010. "This should be a double-hull icebreaker capable of moving in...

1/8/2007 - MCMURDO, Antartica (AFNEWS) -- The Coast Guard became part of the Air Force-led Joint Task Force Support Forces Antarctica Jan. 1 with the arrival of the Cutter Polar Sea at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Home ported in Seattle, the Polar Sea arrived after a month-long voyage including stops in Honolulu and Sydney, Australia. The Polar Sea joined the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which began breaking ice Dec. 26. For the past 50 years, Coast Guard icebreakers have deployed to Antarctica in support of Operation Deep Freeze, where ships have broken through as much as 84 nautical miles of ice to...